Last Day In Asakusa

 I started our last full day in Asakusa with another nice run un the river. It was overcast and very comfortable. I'm gonna miss this view every morning

I've been wanting to get back to the Edo Museum for several years. It had been under construction since before COVID and it was opened again. Of course, we didn't realize it had just opened back up a few months ago, and we weren't the only ones who wanted to see it again. So we once again were stuck in a crowd, though this one was far smaller and more under control. It was people going to a museum, after all.

The museum shows the history of Edo (Tokyo) from it's initial founding as the Shogunate capital by the Tokugawas to modern day Tokyo. There's just a lot of really interesting exhibits and information. It's largely in Japanese, but the huge advancements in LLM-based machine translation made scanning and translating a lot of the text fast and easy, so I was able to quickly read the wall of kanji for a lot of the exhibits. Lots of dioramas, documents from the periods. Lots of really cool information about books of the Edo period (a very educated populous, especially for the time). We didn't even get to see it all in the few hours we were there. (Warning, lots of pictures)

After the museum, we stopped in Akihabara for a little bit, then headed back to Asakusa for lunch. While there, we ran into yet another set of street performances, this time really well done. There was a magician (we missed his show, but he drew quite a crowd), a few VERY well done living statues (performers looking like statues). This one woman when she was still looked like a metal statue, and when she moved, it was like a robot moving. Hard to explain, but she was so good, Sumi didn't think she was human at first.

breaking character to talk to a kid for a bit

After lunch we were heading back to Sensouji because we can't leave without one more daifuku from that stand (it really is that good) when we heard drums. We followed the sounds and found ourselves watching a parade that turned into an Awa Odori performance! 

The rest of the evening was spent doing unexciting chores: laundry, packing, cleaning, etc as we prepared to leave tomorrow morning. It's been a really enjoyable trip. The snorkeling and Okinawa, in general was a lot of fun, despite the lack of food. Tokyo is always a good time and this time we saw a lot of new things, some quite unexpected.